In today's on-line search engines, relevance of sponsored results to user intent drives performance across many applications. The Yahoo!® search engine is an example. Previously, search engines restricted relevance to very tight semantic similarity, such as spelling corrections or synonyms. However, these systems do not account for the fact that other kinds of relevance may capture the economically salient part of user intent, or, like traditional advertising, help to generate a new intent or desire on the part of the user. Terms that co-occur since they belong to complementary categories of products or services, to shared clusters of activities or tasks, shared (sub)cultures, tastes, styles, locations or temporalities are referred to herein as associative matches.
The business of placing advertisements in an online context is a process of determining user wants or needs that have some economic value. The user may not be conscious of what they want or need, and the latent desire (and accompanying economic activity) could be driven by an advertisement, the online context, the user herself, the state of the world at large, or some combination of all four.
In many cases the economic opportunity is clear. If a user searches for “HP 932C printer cartridge” it is reasonable to assume that replacement parts for the specific brand and model of printer form a reasonable set of value propositions. In this case it is likely that advertisements based on phrases typed into a search engine that are all semantically relevant to the printer part in question perform better than other advertisements. In the case of a sponsored search in a search engine, the economic intent of the user (buying a new printer cartridge for his or her printer, for example) may be sufficiently clear.
In many instances, however, the economic intent of a user is less clear. For example, user intent may be ambiguous because the user is not directly performing an economic activity (reading news rather than searching for products) or because an error has occurred (the user has landed on a parked domain), or simply because there is no clear economic intent found in the query itself that the user provides.
In addition to the foregoing, there are many situations where directly relevant advertisements are not appropriate since relevant advertisements may cannibalize, or otherwise compete with, some other primary revenue stream associated with a content item. For example, a provider of an auction web site, such as Yahoo! Auction pages, may wish to refrain from advertising products that compete with auction results, which could anger or otherwise frustrate sellers.
Accordingly, given the above-discussed shortcomings in existing systems, there is a need for systems and methods for performance of associative matching, which may provide mechanisms for increasing coverage of the display of advertisements while maintaining plausible relevance.